Backpacker Fiction: A Sense of Place: 6 Literary Stamps in your Passport

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

A Sense of Place: 6 Literary Stamps in your Passport

Critical to any piece of writing that uses a country as one of its main characters, is a perfected and sustainable sense of place. I'm not talking about the overly sensualized, chapter-long descriptions of a single scene, but the pithy yet evocative concoctions of words that catapult the reader into the reality of an environment with seemingly minimal effort.

Here are six books that are as good as a stamp in your passport:

1. Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes.

Some of the most mouth-watering writing I've ever read, Mayes' always stops herself from sounding twee or try-to-hard. Restoring your own villa in Tuscany will be at the top of your life-list not two chapters in.

2. Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas.

Revolutionary Cuba never sounded so attractive. Arenas' unique style and mental-eye makes you feel as though you're part of a rum-swigging fiesta, booing Castro in the muggy underground Havanan arts scene.

3. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie.

India's vibrant history is woven through with threads of magic-realism, capturing the intense and still-exotic experience of being on the sub-continent. Rushdie's voice is so strong that I can only read him in small stints, years apart, so that my own writing doesn't end up sounding like a cheap knock-off.

4. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.

Nirvana or bust: Kerouac's jazz-driven prose is at its best in this work. Road-side diners serving stacks of dripping pancakes and pots of black coffee, highway ditches crawling with bums who cook sausage over campfires, Kerouac writes a hymn to 1950's America.

5. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

1920's France and Spain are enviously cool. Absinthe flows freely. Cigarette holders dangle between the fingers of bored expatriates. You'll look in the mirror afterward and see a sunburn from an afternoon of bullfighting and need a quick siesta.

6. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson.

I include Carson's "novel in verse" because of the way her language transports and mesmerizes the reader. She plays visual jokes with her metaphors and conjures scenes as clear as a medium's crystal ball. South America comes alive and the adventure is real.